Remembering Garrett Gomez, Talented and Troubled Jockey
Mark Zerof-USA TODAY Sports

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Remembering Garrett Gomez, Talented and Troubled Jockey

Garrett Gomez was born to race horses. He reached the summit of the sport. Unfortunately, he was never able to outrun the demons of his childhood.

Two days before the 2010 Breeders' Cup Classic at Churchill Downs, jockey Garrett Gomez was thrown from a horse named Indy Bouquet, who in the incident, broke a bone in her ankle and was later euthanized. Gomez was examined at a nearby hospital. His shoulder hurt, but it seemed like he was all right.

"Just watch me ride," he said the next day. "I'm a little achy, that's to be expected, I had a 1,200-pound animal fall on top of me yesterday."

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Gomez, who weighed about 110 pounds, had been a professional jockey for twenty years. He was 38 years old. Twice he had won the Eclipse Award given to the country's best rider. And the next day, he was set to take on the most popular horse in America: the undefeated Zenyatta, who had been featured on 60 Minutes and been named to Oprah Winfrey's "O Power List."

Read More: Remembering Jose Fernandez

At the time, Gomez was one of the world's leading jockeys. And his Breeders' Cup Classic mount, Blame, was no slouch. But the attention was on Zenyatta, whose record would improve to 20-0 with a win in the $5 million race. Blame was an afterthought. So was Gomez, who after riding earlier in the morning, had taken some ibuprofen and spent his final hour before the race icing his shoulder. He could hardly lift his arm by race time.

Zenyatta, fell behind early, waiting to make her run. As the pack narrowed around the final turn, Zenyatta, ridden by Mike Smith, made her push from the outside. But just before Zenyatta could find her stride, Gomez and Blame shot out to the front of the pack from a pocket on the inside—building a lead that seemed to shrink with every stride from Zenyatta. As they approached the finish, 100 yards out and then fifty, Zenyatta seemed certain to overtake Blame. The question was whether there was enough track left.

When they reached the finish, Gomez and Smith looked at each other—they weren't sure if Blame had held on or if Zenyatta had come from behind. Then they heard the result from the track announcer. "I finally got a chance to get excited," Gomez told Rudolph Alvarado for his biography, The Garrett Gomez Story: A Jockey's Journey Through Addiction & Salvation.

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A few days after the race, doctors found two hairline fractures in Gomez's shoulder.

"Garrett had to win," said Gino Roncelli, a friend of Gomez's and co-founder of the Winner's Foundation, a nonprofit based at Santa Anita that aims to help people in the horse racing industry deal with addiction . "And it's too bad because life isn't like that. You can't win all the time."

Gomez died last month in Tucson, Arizona. He was found alone and unconscious in a room at the Casa Del Sol Casino Resort. He was 44 years old.

Garrett Gomez was born on New Year's Day in 1971 in Tucson. It did not take long before everybody in his life knew that he had been put on earth to ride horses. Gomez knew it from the time he knew his name. His father Louie was a jockey. When he was just a few days old, his parents brought him out on the road, from track to track with them. When Louie won his first race with Garrett in attendance, he took the boy in his arms and rode him into the winner's circle.

Gomez knew as well as anybody that he was meant to be a jockey. By the time he was four, he was putting on his father's silks and helmet, and riding the arm of his parent's couch like it was a horse, wearing out the fabric with his father's whip. He used to hang in the jockey's room at the track and chew tobacco with the guys—he was five years old. He knew how to talk to horses. He knew how to make them move. He was afraid of nothing on the race track.

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As a kid, Gomez would watch his father race at tracks in Arizona and New Mexico, then come up to him afterwards and critique his performance. He was a horse racing savant, before he even raced a horse.

"It was amazing," his father told Alvarado, "just how detailed he'd get about what he thought I'd done right or wrong. 'You should've kept him to the inside,' he'd say, or 'why didn't you take him to the outside?' or 'why didn't you take him through the hole that opened up down the homestretch?' I'm thinking I'd run a pretty good race only to find out that I hadn't. It was depressing."

Gomez dropped out of high school after two years. He wouldn't need a degree to be a jockey. He was determined to become a top-tier rider. And that's what he would be for the rest of his life.


If the one constant in Gomez's childhood was horses, the other was drugs and alcohol. During summer break visits to his grandparents' house in Arizona, Gomez would drive with his grandfather from bar to bar, shooting pool as a six and seven-year-old. He watched his aunts and uncles drink beer and smoke marijuana, so he snuck into another room and he drank beer and smoked marijuana.

Alvarado, in his book, describes Gomez's entire life as a battle between horse racing and addiction. His mother's side of the family was full of alcoholics and addicts. His maternal grandfather had been sexually abusive to relatives. Gomez had never seen a life without horse racing or without substance abuse. He had no stable nuclear family. There was no healthy model of working through issues. "Even if he wanted to, he couldn't have prevented his drive to become a jockey, or an alcoholic and a drug addict," Alvarado wrote.

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By the time he was 18, Gomez was out on his own. He was already a pro jockey and already an alcoholic. In Hot Springs, Arkansas, he met his first wife, Beth. They were 19. When a horse stepped on his face after a crash, Beth nursed him to recovery. When, for months afterward, Gomez didn't want to leave his bedroom, Beth tried to stop him from falling deeper into drunken despair. Finally, the thing that got Gomez to come out of his room was the prospect of riding a horse again. That didn't mean getting clean—it just meant getting clean enough.


You can't race a horse drunk. Not just because of the competitive disadvantage, either. It's too dangerous, too hard. And the pressure to win every single race is too great.

A 2012 study in the Medical Journal of Australia found that racing horses is the most dangerous profession in the world after offshore fishing—more dangerous than boxing. Jockeys race 1,200 pound horses half a dozen times a day around sharp turns in tight quarters at speeds upwards of 30 miles per hour. A single slip-up could be the end of your life, your fellow jockeys' lives, or your horse's life. It could mean permanent disability, and simultaneously losing the only means you had of paying for long-term care.

And it isn't like you are guaranteed great medical insurance, or huge savings to fall back on if you do get hurt. Jockeys are paid out of purses when they ride a winning horse: ten percent for first place, five percent for second through fifth. They aren't guaranteed more than a small fee—as low as $28 in some cases. "Jockeys are the worst-paid and most seriously injured athletes in any professional sports," CNN wrote before the 2015 Kentucky Derby.

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This means there is intense pressure to win—and to get the best mounts. If you win, you get to ride good horses. If you ride good horses, you get to win. There is no offseason in horse racing, so there's no rest either. Take a month off, and you lose a mount. You lose a potential opportunity. You risk a relationship with a trainer. And through it all, you have to maintain weight.

In an interview with VICE Sports, Gomez's former agent Ron Anderson put it this way: imagine if a hockey or baseball player had no offseason—no chance to recover for more than say a week or ten days. Imagine the kind of mental and physical pressure they'd be under all the time.

Gomez at the 2010 Kentucky Derby. Photo: Mark Zerof-USA TODAY Sports.

From the time of his pro debut in 1988 to the time of his retirement in 2015, Gomez balanced brilliant riding with a series of rock bottoms that threatened to undermine his career. When he was mired in his addiction, the only places he felt comfortable, he told Alvarado, were inside of the bottle and on the back of a horse.

He felt at home only in the places where he'd spent his childhood: in bars where he didn't know anybody, and at the track where he was a somebody.

"He always had a way to put a smile one everybody's face," said close friend Damian Scott. "I know in the room he was always laughing. Had the guys laughing in there. Even sometimes he would laugh, even if the content necessarily wasn't funny—his laughter would make it funny."

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There were stints in rehab and in jail. His marriage to Beth would fall apart and he would lose everything, including custody of their two kids. He would miss divorce proceedings and then tell off a judge who asked him why he hadn't shown up.

But he continued to win on the track. He found the perfect cocktail of drugs and booze to avoid the shakes every day. In 1994, Gomez, then 22, won the Arkansas Derby aboard Concern. And according to Alvarado, Gomez "couldn't remember being sober a single day since he'd left home at age 15."

Gomez would go on to ride Concern to third place at the Preakness Stakes.

"He was bred to be a jockey and he got on horses since he was a little kid," said his former agent Anderson." He had a sixth sense for the animal and how to get from what I call point A to point B in a race. He was just different."

He remarried to a horse trainer named Pam, in California, and had two more children. But he still struggled to manage his addictions. He spiraled into coke and meth use. He wound up in county jail and then in rehab again. And finally, it appeared to stick.

In 2004, he returned to racing. He wasn't using, and all of a sudden he was winning. In 2005, he ranked fifth in earnings by an American jockey. Each of the next four years, he would rank first. It was one of the greatest runs in modern horse racing—capped by the Breeder's Cup Classic victory with the broken shoulder.

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He began working on the book with Alvarado. He stayed involved with Impact, the rehab facility he attended, and the Winner's Foundation. Jockeys, valets, and grooms would come to him for advice on how to get sober. He avoided minor races so he could stay home and be there for his family.

In June of 2013, Gomez informed California racing officials that he had had a slip with alcohol. The next month, he announced that he and Pam were getting divorced. He missed a series of races, and entered a tenuous legal battle in order to be cleared to race. He finally returned for a handful of races in September and October.

Then he sent a text message to his agent: "Take me off the horses. I'm not going to ride for the time being."

Almost two years later, in June of 2015, Gomez officially announced his retirement on Facebook.

I would like to thank everyone in the sport of horse racing for all the support I ever received in my career. I enjoyed every horse I ever rode and I thank all of them for making my career. I'd like to apologize to all my fans for leaving the sport the way I did. Sometimes you have to do things in life for yourself. I'd like everyone to know I'm officially retired from the sport of horse racing .I thank everyone for all I achieved that had a part in my career. I had a lot of awesome moments in this game. BEST GAME IN THE WORLD. THANK YOU HORSE RACING.

From that point, friends say Gomez became more reclusive. He would respond to the occasional text message or phone call, but would not accept invitations to visit or catch up. He thought about coming back, but not before he got his life together, said Scott. He posted pictures of his family on social media.

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"He always had a respect for the game," Scott said. "If he wasn't 100 percent he wasn't going to get on the back of a horse and risk his life or the lives of his other fellow riders."

Roncelli, a co-founder of the Winner's Foundation and its board president, was a friend of Gomez, and worked with him to get his life back on track. He says he he became concerned the moment he read Alvarado's book. The book, he pointed out, spent a lot of time talking about the process of getting clean. But there wasn't much in there about how Gomez might stay clean—which is just as hard.

"Those high pressure jobs are more susceptible I think," he said. "You have to be on top all the time, you can't let down. Guys like him, it's a year round job. It isn't like a seasonal job. This is like, you've gotta be on top all the time. You can't give up your big mounts."

Without a system in place to ease some of that the pressure, without the structure of meetings or something like it, it's that much harder to maintain your sobriety, Roncelli said.

After Gomez's family announced his passing in December, Daily Racing Form reported that Gomez died of a drug overdose. There has, however, been no official report. Gomez's family has declined to comment.

"Garrett was liked and respected and loved everybody," said Anderson, his former agent. "But at the end of the day he kind of just didn't love himself."

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